20 Random Facts About Sally-Anne Perks
by Thanfiction
Summary: You have to learn to make your way in the dark before you can find the light. Part of the Daydverse 20 Random Facts series.


**1. She has a Mummy and a Mother. **  
Her biological father is Mummy's brother, who found out that the two girls were more than just friends and blackmailed Mother into sleeping with him. When she got pregnant, the families tried to make them marry, and she and Mummy ran away. They were 17, openly lesbian, on the run in the Muggle world with nothing more than they could steal and carry, one of them pregnant, and they still made it. Even after the DA, Sally- Anne thinks her parents are the bravest women she knows.

**2. She is the oldest, and the only Hufflepuff. **  
It didn't even occur to her to ask who the other fathers were until she was 8. She was told it didn't matter and really, it didn't. Alan, Lewis, Gary, and Phillip were 3, 5, 6, and 8 years younger, and they got on so well that strangers were often startled to find out they were siblings. Well, that and that they didn't look one whit alike, but she hadn't questioned that either. Not every family popped them out of a mold like the Weasleys. Lewis and Gary were Gryffindor and Ravenclaw and in the DC, but Alan was Slytherin, and she'd told the Commander from the very beginning that if the Slytherins were forced to fight for You-Know-Who, fuck the DA, she wouldn't fight _against _them, but she'd cut ranks and go protect her baby brother.

**3. Her name was a peace gesture **  
She is named for both of her grandmothers, something very prominently pointed out on the pictures of the grinning 4-toothed 1 year old that were the first communications since the notes accompanying the leaving. They had waited until there could be a proper flat in the background. No one - even, to this day, Sally-Anne - needed to know how rough some of that time in between had been. Despite the gesture, she never met either of them, nor the rest of her extended family. She did find the letter when she was 13, tucked in the back of the linen closet. It had been marked "return to sender, we have  
no daughter."

**4. She learned a lot of things young and ugly.**  
Like why they called Mummy "Auntie" when they were out with Mother certain places and why she was told to lie about her father having run off. Like what dyke and fanny diver and a thousand other lovely phrases meant and why sometimes Mother had to put her hand on Mummy's arm and take her wand. Like even after all this time, she still hasn't told the DA or let them come over to the house because she couldn't bear it if one of her family proved hurtful to her other family and she gets so scared every time she even starts thinking about it that she makes an excuse to herself for why not this time. After all this time, even Norman believes she grew up with her mother and her aunt. By now, there are just too many lies to confess to.

**5. She grew up in marketing**  
Mummy was in advertising and PR for the Ministry, handling everything from political campaigns to trying to get people to use the Floo Network properly, and it was a game when she was a small child to see what the adverts were really saying. The grandmum on the biscuit tin promises us we'll feel loved if we buy those. He's posing with the baby to make you think of him like a good dad and vote for him. They put the same thing in a pink box and charge more and say it's special for witches. She put all of this to good use with the DA, and was their propaganda master within a week, designing every publicity stunt they pulled.

**6. She was terrified of dogs **  
Their next door neighbor had two Alsatians who barked at everything, and he would always yell at anyone who approached that he'd trained them to be vicious and rip your face off. Mother assured her that this was all posturing and they were really very sweet, excitable animals, but after her doll accidentally wound up in their yard and they tore it to bits, she had nightmares for weeks. She still hates dogs, especially big ones. Getting one was not an option, even when she lost her eyes.

**7. She won a lifetime supply of Fizzing Whizbees. **  
It was a contest for a new flavor (Blackcurrent Buzz! She drew the picture and wrote the jingle and everything) when she was not quite 8, and she still thinks it might have been a little unfair considering her background. The biggest shock, though, wasn't that she won. It was that she had envisioned a lifetime supply as meaning either a vast mountain of sweeties or a packet that had been charmed to never be empty. The truth was, she still gets 10 packets a month in the post. As she got older, she saw the irony that she'd been taken in by the marketing.

**8. She has always wanted a snake. **  
By the time she was old enough to take the responsibility, Alan was scared to death of them (this got awkward enough when he was sorted, but a live one was always out of the question). Later, she wasn't sure she could properly take care of one blind, but by the time she got her eyes, she'd also gotten Norman, and he'd never been all right with them since Nagini, which she respected. There were things none of them were all right with any more, after all. She was still a regular at Eeylops, though, and she had become such friends with the big albino ball python in the window that some suspected Parseltongue. She didn't speak it, not that she knew of, but it was soothing to stroke the smooth, delicate interlock of the scales and feel the rippling, sinuous strength beneath

**9. She was a total Gilderoy Lockhart fangirl  
**It's humiliating now, was humiliating by the time she was 14 and the truth started getting around about his 'accident.' But from about 10-13, she was IN LOVE. She had all of his books, magazine articles, most of his merchandise, even the doll with all 46 outfits and the accessory packs and the real brushable styleable hair and its line of signature products and his self-titled album of love songs. She wore his signature fragrance and bragged how it had been designed off his personal version of Amortentia. When she got the chance to meet him, it took a week to decide what to wear, and it 2 tries to get her name out. Sort of. The autograph read "to Suzanne."

**10. She didn't make peace with her body until the DA.**  
She was the first girl in her class to get her period just shy of her 9th birthday. She was a B cup by her 10th and had already been groped by a stranger on the bus. F cup by the time she was 14, by far the largest of any girl near her own age, she hated everything from fitting shirts to backache to walking down the street pretending to be deaf and wondering if the Trace counted if you stabbed bloke with your wand. She ate emotionally at first, hated herself for it (still got the handsy men though she told herself less of it than if she wasn't fat) but was afraid to reduce, sure she'd look like a stick with balloons and it would all be worse. Rowan didn't give her a choice about losing 3 stone, and _they_ wound up going down two sizes. She was still busty, but learning what her body could DO changed much more than her dress measurements.

**11. For almost a year after the battle, she didn't believe the ****Healers**  
She hadn't been hit, just NEAR the explosion. It was even called flash blindness. Surely it was like looking into any other bright light and not being able to see afterwards. They triaged her minor, wouldn't have done that if it was true that waiting too long meant the retinal burns couldn't be healed correctly. It wasn't any big thing that changed it, either. 11 months after the battle, she just woke up screaming and screaming. It was still dark. She knew. Her parents came to help, but she couldn't be soothed. She just curled tighter and tighter on herself, clutching her knees until her fingers made the sides of her legs bleed and screaming, screaming, screaming._ I can't see, I can't see, I can't see. It's true. It's true. It's forever. I'm blind, blind, blind, blind._

**12. She worked for George Weasley for 6 years.**  
He sent her the job offer 3 times, 3 times she ignored it. The 4th time, he showed up and ticked her off that he wasn't being bloody patronizing, Fred's last product line activated by light when you opened the packet and had to be assembled in total darkness so would she just take the damned job already because he couldn't think of anyone else and the products were too brilliant not to sell. He offered her half the profits from the line in addition to her wages and threatened to start singing. She took the offer without any singing required, and he's still one of her best friends. They even dated a few times, and he was every bit as good with his hands as she suspected.

**13. She is a painter.**  
For a long time, it was what she was hoping to do for a living. She loved watercolors and had even sold a few through coffee shops by the time she was a teenager. After she lost her sight, her Mummy bought her thick acrylics, and she painted texturescapes on broad canvas, abstracts of emotion and the shapes of still life in bas relief. She assumed they were shit until Norm confessed he was selling them for small fortunes to wizard and Muggle clients alike. She still paints with her eyes out.

**14. She's an absolutely awful cook.**  
Her failures are legendary; the frozen bolognase that she managed to set half on fire while the other half remained a solid chunk of ice, the noodles that turned to a single starchy mush block in the pot, the roast that was so salty Meg said it had sweat a kind of white crust...she even had the preternatural ability to muck up things that came in boxes and tins. On the other hand, she was far too stubborn to ask someone to cook for her, so she made do. Her pantry had a lot of things in packets, and most days were muesli in the morning, grab a bun and a cup of tea on the way to work, a big takeaway special for lunch, and the leftovers after, with something from the corner shop or one of the packet foods if she got hungry later. Occasionally Zach would give her something Meg had sent, and that was the only home-cooked food her kitchen ever successfully encountered. Men she dated tended to find this somewhere between charming and horrifying.

**15. She tried to report for the Druim Cett incident.**  
It had been five years, and she felt she'd coped very well, all things considered. She was living on her own, had a nicely paying job, friends, lads off and on when she felt like it, all the little systems and charms that let her function smoothly through her days, and when her Galleon went off, she answered it without a second thought. She couldn't see what the letters said, but if the DA needed her, it didn't matter. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. She should have known. She should have expected the too-gentle tone when the Commander explained they didn't need HER. That she could go home. He didn't say it, but she knew. She was useless. Crippled. A burden. She hadn't gone home. She'd gone to Susan and demanded I don't care what it takes, what I have to do, who I have to blow, hex, bribe, or kill_...find a way for me to see again._

**16. She had to qualify blind.**  
It was an awful kind of catch-22. The prosthesis weren a generation beyond what old Mad-Eye had, and they gave her options for x-ray, infrared, ultraviolet, electromagnetic spell residue visibility, magnification, and about a half dozen other features...but they also required a security clearance for which the only way to get it without a dozen years working her way up the ranks of the Ministry was to join the Aurors. But to join the Aurors, she had to pass the qualifying test. It should have been impossible, but they had underestimated the determination of the DA to help their own. Harry, Zach, Demelza, and Tony spent six months with her, hour after hour after hour, until she knew every inch of the course, every target precisely committed to muscle memory, every heartbeat memorized. She was three points shy of a perfect score.

**17. She's pretty sure she shouldn't have gotten married. **  
It's not that she wants to be with someone else, because she doesn't. It's not that there's anything wrong with her marriage, because there isn't. There's just nothing particularly dazzlingly right with it either. He does his thing, she does hers, they're friends and roommates, they have sex when they feel like it, and it's pretty good. They'd been that way for almost three years when he said they should probably get married, taxes and all, and she'd said yes, mostly because she felt silly being the only one of her friends who wasn't. But that wasn't really a good reason, she knew, and she knew she didn't honestly love him, but that brought up the very frightening thought that actually, romantically speaking, she'd never particularly loved anyone. She knew that should have bothered her. It didn't, except for the fact that she was unfortunately very sure that Norm loved her. Which was, at the end of the day, why she hadn't said anything.

**18. She secretly practices Necromancy.**  
Not the creation of Infiri or zombies or Horcruxes. She just wants to talk to the dead, more than just Colin. She wants to tell Morag that she of all people has become an Auror, tell Gertie about all of Meg's beautiful babies, ask Janice how that story about her Mum and the bowtruckle in the closet ended, find out if Derek ever found that gorgeous Indian prince of his on the other side and if they've ever somehow seen the Puget Sound together after all. It's not that her life is empty without them, it's that it's so full that it gapes all the wider where they were cut away, so on the night of the anniversary and again on Samhain when the veil is thin, she and Luna go to the Forbidden Forest and hold a seance. She's never quite gotten through, but a few times, she swears she's heard whispers that weren't the wind.

**19. She doesn't want children.**  
Norm does, and it's the biggest problem in their marriage, because he still half thinks never means someday, means when she gets over it, means when things get better. But never means never, and if he wants to play with babies so much, Meg has been her best friend for 20+ years and has plenty of the little shits. It's not even that she doesn't love them. She does. So much it hurts. But just because she's survived doesn't mean she'll bring another life into this world, and just because she's good with someone else's doesn't mean she has any illusions that she'd have any patience with her own. Her threshold for stupid is far too low.

**20. She's going to stay with the Aurors.**  
The deal Susan made would allow her to keep her eyes if she served ten years, reasoning that the spelltech would have moved forward enough that they would no longer be a top-secret model. At the time, she wondered how she'd ever last that long, but she's come to love not only the job itself, but to feel like she's part of a family there. It suits her, the perfect mix of the horrible and the mundane, and she'd stay until she died of old age if they let her. Sometimes she jokes in a way that isn't really a joke at all that maybe it's only by stumbling around in the dark for long enough that we all find where we belong.


End file.
